The dissertation studies a fifty-year period m the history of the Department of Science and Art (DSA), based in South Kensington,London. The DSA was founded in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition, where prominent commentators had remarked on the unfavourable light in which the aesthetic quality of objects from the industrialized countries compared with those from the non-industrialized or uncivilized peoples of the world. Answering the ensuing call for design reform in industrial manufactures, the DSA assembled a pedagogical apparatus for design education that eventually stretched across the breadth of the British empire.

Comprising under its administration 120 Schools of Design in Britain alone, the foundational premises of the Department were liberal, even radical. Headed by Henry Cole, a feisty bureaucrat, it aimed at improving the pernicious effects of industrialization in the metropole through the palliative inculcation of aesthetic taste in the industrial worker. At the core of its reform-minded ideology was the dyad between the worker and the traditional artisan, the latter being the foil through which this reformative aestheticism was legitimized.

As metropolitan reform reached the colonies, with its attendant concerns about native agency, DSA aficionados eventually brought their pedagogic zeal to India as well. In India, the inherent liberalism of the DSA enterprise quickly saw itself as champion of the decaying native industries and Indian artisanry under the onslaught of cheap mass-produced imports from the metropole. At first sight, the preservative, localizing and decentralizing impetus of the DSA-apparatus in colonial India appears to be a simple extension of British cultural polity in the metropole. In spite of this seeming homology, the dissertation argues that the liberal practices of artistic pedagogy do not play out in the same way between metropole and colony. The DSA's preservative impulse in fact partook of the mode of indirect rule or decentralized despotism, the administrative hallmark of late imperialism. Imbued within the localist rubrics of caste, local marketplace and native authority by colonialepistemology, the Indian artisan became that much more susceptible to direct super-exploitation by the metropolitan center, unable to access to global representationality on its own terms.